Conventionally, a camera captures a video frame via a camera parameter. The camera parameter can have, for example, a video frame capturing parameter such as an exposure time. Alternatively, the camera parameter can have other parameters, such as a video frame rate. Exposure time (or named shutter speed) is the effective length of time a camera's shutter is open. Exposure time along with the aperture of the lens (also called f-number) determines the amount of light that reaches the film or an image sensor inside the camera. Long exposure time will cause image blur easily. On the contrary, short exposure time will cause image dark or noise easily. The aperture or camera sensor is always small in a camera phone (or a smartphone). When image resolution increases, the amount of light of each pixel will decrease. Therefore, it is hard to set a balanced camera parameter to generate a fine video frame.
A stereo camera is a type of camera with two or more cameras (or named a multi-view stereo camera) with a separate image sensor for each camera. A stereo camera is always used to generate a multi-view video frame (ex. a 3D video frame) based on the video frames generated from different cameras. Different cameras of the stereo camera may apply different camera parameters.
However, the spec of the multi-view video frame output may base on a lower camera parameter that can be covered by a higher camera parameter. For example, spec of the multi-view video frame output may base on the lower frame rate. That is, if a left camera has a frame rate of 60 fps and a right camera has a frame rate of 30 fps, the frame rate of the multi-view video frame output is 30 fps. Additionally, the spec of the multi-view video frame output may base on the lower image resolution. For example, if a left camera has an image resolution of 8 M and a right camera has an image resolution of 2 M, the image resolution of the multi-view video frame output is 2 M.